BASEBALL

BASEBALL; Hardball Isn't New To Top Negotiator

By CLAIRE SMITH

Published: December 20, 1992

Sonny Hall, the president of New York City's 37,000-member Transport Workers Union, does not profess to know about the inner workings of major league baseball's labor-management relations. But Hall is not at all surprised that as new negotiations approach, some very new twists are about to be introduced to some age-old baseball arguments.

Revenue sharing. Revenue participation. Salary cap.

"That doesn't surprise me at all," Hall said of the landmark goals. "That sounds like Dick," he added, and laughed. Peace Is Priority

Dick, to those unfamiliar, is Richard Ravitch, former head of New York City's Metropolitan Transportation Authority, architect of the revitalization of the Urban Development Corporation and the Bowery Savings Bank, former mayoral candidate and now the point man on labor for baseball's 28 owners.

Two weeks ago, Ravitch, president of the Player Relations Committee, the owners' bargaining arm, announced that the owners had decided to reopen the basic labor agreement with the players union, albeit by a slim 15-13 vote. The task at hand now, for both Ravitch and the union representatives, is to find a way to win the peace before another war breaks out in the form of a strike or a lockout. Ominously, it is something neither side has been able to avoid in seven consecutive sets of negotiations.

To try to reverse history, Ravitch will try to alter the staid approach to business that many in management, including Ravitch, insist has brought small-market teams to the precipice. And, as Hall pointed out, it is not the first time Ravitch has tried to buck overwhelming odds.

As chairman of the M.T.A., Ravitch once came up with what Hall described as "a radical concept that scared us and others" -- the capital rebuilding of the subway and bus systems using a bonding system that would offer fare boxes as collateral. Right in Most Cases

"It was a dramatic change for anybody to look at and it made a lot of people nervous because of the very fact that it was a radical change," Hall said. "It was not the way business was done. Putting that weight on the fare boxes scared everybody."

Ravitch, allied with wary state officials, carried the day, and Hall says now that if he had not, "the rebuilding of the subway system of New York just never would have happened."

"So we've been fortunate," Hall said. "He has been proven in most cases to be right when he did radical moves with us."

No one can predict whether that will happen again, especially in a unique industry where players and their employers both boast multitudes of millionaires, where the union basically demands that the status quo be preserved, and where the owners' local interests are often at odds with the game's national interests.

But Hall does point to one certainty he is sure to come baseball's way.

"Dick makes people face the issue," Hall said. "If you're opposed, he's going to make people explain why they're opposed. You can't use the argument with Dick Ravitch that, well, we've never done business this way."

To some, the comparison between Ravitch's past predicaments and his present situation are too delicious to pass up. 'A Lot of Parallels'

"I imagine trying to handle the subway situation there in New York has got a lot of parallels with trying to figure out how to try to make baseball come together," said George W. Bush, a general partner with the Texas Rangers and a supporter of the course Ravitch is plotting.

Ravitch chose to explain his presence in baseball more bluntly.

"Some would say I have a neurotic addiction to difficult problems," he said in an interview last Wednesday. "Look, I love sports and it was presented to me as a challenge of limited duration but one fraught with significance to the future of baseball."

Ravitch decided to join the sport about a year ago for all of the above reasons plus one more.

"Baseball is a very important part of my culture, and I thought it would be an interesting thing to do," he said.

Ravitch came to the game as well-schooled as possible in the history of those who have gone before him and knows it is neither pretty nor for the faint of heart. But he believes things could change, for both the game and himself.

"I think that the times are different and that the definition of my role is different from that of my predecessors," he said. "And my mandate, my privately stated mandate, was to deal with the total economic situation in baseball, not just with the union contract." A Broader Look

That Ravitch was instructed to take a broader look by the owners perhaps best explains both why and how he was presumed to be a major player in baseball's major conflagration this past summer. That firestorm consumed baseball's last commissioner, Fay Vincent, after Vincent resisted the effort by Ravitch and some owners to cede the commissioner's "best interest of baseball" powers in the area of labor.

Ravitch has steadfastly declined to discuss his role in that battle publicly other than to insist he was neither empire-building nor trying to succeed Vincent. "I have no other agendas," he said.